I try to include as many people as possible during the early stages of developing a design, mostly for the brainstorming sessions. Developers, Product Managers, and Business Analysts all look at a project differently, and can provide powerful insights. Involving them in the design process also transfers the ownership of the design to the team, rather than belonging to a single person. Design brainstorming sessions take time, and when you are talking about the time of developers and product managers your talking about cold hard cash. Getting them wholed up in a room for two to three hours while a design concept is hammered out just isn’t realistic.

The amount of time it takes to perform a proper brainstorming sessions depends greatly on the problem being solved. Initial concepts and sketches should be created during the first half of a session, including any necessary process flows. The design team can then bring in a small group of developers and product managers to review the initial flows and designs to provide immediate feedback. Ideas are bounced around and added to the concepts, eventually a realistic review is done. For a variety of reasons a design or flow may need to be modified due to a project’s schedule or technical constraints. Doing these modifications early allows the design review team to already have an idea on how a design solves a problem, and familiar with the high level concepts that went into its creation.

With the overall team becoming involved in the begging, design reviews become an activity to ensure that nothing got lost in translation. Now, an hour long design review could in theory be reduced to a half hour, letting everyone get back to work and not be stuck in a stuffy conference room.